president barack obama killed one in the wilds of yemen. if you affiliate yourself with enemy forces and go to war against american citizens and kill americans willfully on behalf of a movement or an enemy force, then you can be considered an enemy combatant. if in world war ii you went to join the nazi forces you are not an enemy combatant? of course you are. host: hina shamsi. guest: it is true u.s. citizens can take up arms against the united states and then they become what is called understood the laws of war belligerents. the problem here that we are talking about is extending and expanding the laws of war far beyond what is constitutionally permitted and permitted under the laws themselves. and i think charles was exactly right. what the suspect is accused of is terrorism. if we think of what timothy mcfay did or what was done in -- mcveigh did or what was done in the olympic park bombing, we didn't treat those tragedies as acts of war. we appropriately treated them as criminal acts that had to be investigated, prosecuted and appropr